Grammatical gender processing in Italian and Spanish bilinguals

Abstract

We explored whether the grammatical gender of the native language (L1) affects the production of words in a second language (L2). Evidence from previous studies is contrasting. In the present investigation, Italian-Spanish bilinguals were instructed to name pictures in L2 (Experiments 1 and 2) or to translate words from L1 to L2 (Experiment 3), producing either the bare noun or the noun phrase (article + noun). Half of the nouns had the same gender in the two languages, while the other half had a different gender. In all experiments, responses were faster in the gender-congruent than in the gender-incongruent condition, irrespective of task (L2 picture naming or forward word translation) and syntactic type (bare noun and noun phrase). We propose that in the bilingual system, parallel to the semantic route, a direct lexical, nonsemantic route connects the languages and that the native language interacts at the level of grammatical gender with the lexical representations of the response language.

The representation of asymmetric grammatical gender systems in the bilingual mental lexicon

“…The effect of L1-L2 gender congruency in both the bare noun and DP naming conditions indicates that gender information is always available in lexical access, regardless of whether agreement must be computed. These results are consistent with the lexical hypothesis (Cubelli et al 2005;Paolieri et al 2011), under which grammatical gender is an intrinsic part of the lexical representation and which has also been supported by studies of bilinguals with symmetric gender systems (Paolieri et al 2010b;Lemhöfer et al 2008).…”

“…The shorter naming latencies for gender-congruent than gender-incongruent nouns is consistent with a significant body of previous research in bilinguals with symmetric gender systems (Paolieri et al 2010b;Morales et al 2011;Lemhöfer et al 2008;Bordag 2004;Bordag and Pechmann 2007) and supports the gender-integrated representation hypothesis (Salamoura and Williams 2007). Under this representation account, in the case of L1-L2 gender congruent nouns, the L2 word receives additional activation from the shared gender node given that it is activated by both the L1 and L2 words.…”

“…Given the significant body of evidence (Bordag 2004;Bordag and Pechmann 2007;Lemhöfer et al 2008;Paolieri et al 2010b) in support of the gender-integrated representation hypothesis (Salamoura and Williams 2007), it is predicted that the L1 and L2 gender systems of Spanish-German bilinguals are represented as shared gender nodes. The shared representation of the bilinguals' gender systems would be evident in the presence of a gender congruency effect in which L1-L2 gender congruent nouns are named more quickly than L1-L2 gender incongruent ones.…”

“…Paolieri et al (2010b) have summarized these contrastive accounts under the syntactic hypothesis and the lexical hypothesis. According to the syntactic hypothesis, gender is a node linked to the lexical representation of a word that is only selected in NP production and therefore no gender effect would be observed in bare noun production.…”

“…In bilingual studies, the L2 picture-naming paradigm has shown gender congruency effects in both NP and bare noun production in Czech-German bilinguals (Bordag 2004;Bordag and Pechmann 2007), German-Czech bilinguals (Bordag 2004), German-Dutch bilinguals (Lemhöfer et al 2008), and Italian-Spanish bilinguals (Paolieri et al 2010b;Morales et al 2011). These results support the genderintegrated representation hypothesis (Salamoura and Williams 2007), according to which the naming response is facilitated when the L1 translation equivalent noun and the L2 target word have the same gender but is inhibited when the L1 and L2 equivalent words have different genders (Figure 1).…”